The Piedmont Highlander

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The Piedmont Highlander

The Piedmont Highlander

Junk food should not spam your life

Junk+food+should+not+spam+your+life

It is morning time and breakfast rolls around. You rush out the door without eating. At school, the bell rings and students rush out the door, marking lunch time. Throughout the breezeway, quad, library, and park are arrays of chips, cookies, sugary drinks, and more. Convenient and tasty junk foods are slowly cradled into the mouths and lives of hungry students day by day.

The unhealthy food epidemic does not end in high school, let alone start there. For college students there are sloughs of fast food places, restaurants serving tempting meals, low-quality food services and cafeterias serving hundreds of students, and ubiquitous vending machines.

For elementary school kids, middle schoolers, and grades prior to high school, exhausted parents provide to-go lunches, and must-need snacks are passionately purchased from advertisements and commercials.

Throughout these three daily mealtimes, one common and notorious truth throughout the lives of lots of students and young people is the continuous presence of junk food.

According to the WebMD website, “junk food” generally refers to foods that contribute lots of calories but little nutritional value, and labeling a food as junk food depends on who is being asked. The website listed soda as an example of a junk food, for it does not possess as much nutritional value as a dairy drink or orange juice drink may. 

As active humans with busy schedules, we as students especially need the energy to survive our daily endeavors. But when hunger kicks in, many of us resort to the overly fatty, sugary, and savory that do not have much nutritional benefit.

Sometimes the excessive intake of junk food can be due to busy weeks of not forgetting to pack lunch, preferring to buy lunch, or not having time to understand what we are eating. That is  understandable. Other times, we could use more information or motivation to just make the healthy swap.

According to Time, 90 percent of Americans do not eat enough fruits and vegetables. For that reason, it is really important to make sure that we ask ourselves more often if what we are eating could instead be something with more nutritional value. Even if you are snacking right before sports, fight bad impulse towards the unhealthier foods. Try opting for a healthier alternative like fruit or vegetables. Instead of the energy drink, go for water; hydrate well.

Also, a push should be made for healthier futures, not just by us, in our day-to-day lives, but also by nationwide policies, on a larger scale.

According to Vox Magazine, Hungary and Mexico, so far the only countries with a junk food tax, successfully curbed junk food eating, and individuals experienced beneficial health results. For Hungary specifically, consumers of unhealthy food products responded to the tax by choosing a cheaper, often healthier product, consuming less of the unhealthy product, and changing to another brand of the product or substituting another food.

Forty percent of adult Americans and 19 percent of young Americans are obese, according to Time. Junk food accounts for around 24 percent or a quarter of the total caloric intake of the average American right now, according to NBC News. If a junk food tax could be implemented in California and beyond, this could be another way to disincentivize people from eating certain super unhealthy foods, and we could all experience the benefits as a society. While California may have passed a sugary drinks tax already, it is just as important to encourage an emphasis on what we are eating.

Furthermore, the general health concerns associated with consistent junk food include but are not limited to stroke risks in the future, weight gain, unsightly tooth decay, and gastrointestinal problems, according to the SFGate website. Nobody wants these for harsher, shorter lives.

If we can start eating healthier in our own lives and encouraging healthier eating on a wider scale, in the long-run there is no doubt that these actions will be worth it.

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